Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

Random Reads

The Banality of Goodness: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (IV)

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In 1961, a court reporter named Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann, of course, was the Nazi official who organized the Final Solution—the state-sponsored, systematic genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Decades after the war, the Israeli intelligence agency tracked him down in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial for his crimes.

In her essay “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt wrestles deeply with one of the primary questions to trouble the world in the aftermath of World War II—how was it possible for a country as civilized as Germany was in the 1930s to be responsible for so barbaric an atrocity as the Holocaust?

For instance, what stood out to Hannah Arendt at his trial was how “normal” he was; that is to say: he showed no special signs of hatred, or psychosis, or insanity. She points out that no less than six psychologists examined Eichmann, and they found no evidence of abnormal personality whatsoever. One doctor remarked that his “overall attitude towards people, especially his family and friends, was ‘highly desirable.’”

Hannah Arendt uses the term “the banality of evil” as a way of making sense of this incongruity—how a “normal, everyday guy” could be responsible for one of the most heinous crimes in all of history. The term, the “banality of evil” is her way of suggesting that that evil breeds in the everyday—in the normal—in the banal decisions we all make, or don’t make, all the time.

On his blog Experimental Theology, Richard Beck summarizes the point like this:
The argument Arendt makes ... is that evil isn't dark and deep but is, rather, thin and superficial. Evil is ordinary people thoughtlessly making a million small choices. ... The Holocaust couldn't have happened if people hadn't over time gradually consented to it, through seemingly insignificant daily choices. Laughing nervously, but without objection, to the anti-Semitic joke. Not shopping at the Jewish store. Accepting that promotion when the more qualified Jewish person was passed over. Casting a vote on election day. And so on.
I have wrestled with Arendt’s assessment of the “banality of evil” ever since I came across the concept, and from time to time I still wonder what normal, everyday activities I participate in, as a simple matter of course in a modern society, that history will look back on as evil.

The reason I’m mentioning “the banality of evil” here, in a blog series on the filmography of Tom Hanks, though, is because somewhere around the midpoint of my journey through the complete cinematographic works of Tom Hanks, I began to notice a theme that connected, in my mind, to Hannah Arendt’s work.

It was Tom Hanks penchant for playing ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and exploring the momentous consequences of their mundane decisions to “do the right thing.” I think I noticed it first in Sleepless in Seatle, where a grieving father is thrust into the very real drama of figuring out how he will parent his motherless son well in the midst of his own loneliness and longing (never mind that he ends up with Meg Ryan at the end of the film, the premise that this journey to magical romance started out with is, sadly, about as ordinary as they come).

That was just the tiny tip of an emerging iceberg, though, because shortly afterwards he played Andrew Beckett, the corporate lawyer in Philadelphia who sues his employer after he is fired for having AIDS. Although the legal drama the unfolds quickly leaves the realm of the ordinary, beneath the surface of the story lurk all sorts of questions about standing up for what’s right, even when it costs you, for choosing not to discriminate even though it’s easier to let stereotypes and prejudices do the thinking for you, and discovering the shared humanity in “the other.” These are, of course, ordinary decisions we are all faced with every day in our profoundly polarized world.

The iceberg came into clear focus in his next outing, though, because in 1994, he starred as Forrest Gump, the character that made Tom Hanks both a household name and a Hollywood A-lister. The story probably needs little re-cap, but just recall how Hanks’s portrayal of Forrest—who is, by his own admission, “not a smart man”—emphasizes simple things like commitment to ones friends, and devotion to one’s beloved, determined loyalty, artless honesty, simply “knowing what love is.” And then connect those mundane virtues to the epoch-making moments of American history that Forrest found himself thrust into, as a result of them.

If Hannah Arendt observed at Eichmann’s trial that incomprehensible evil emerges out of the ordinary, everyday decisions we make, all the time, that we won’t do the right thing, Tom Hanks’s films, it seems, offers the other side of that argument; that world-shaping goodness emerges out of all the ordinary moments we decide that we will.

Using Arendt’s language, we might say that Tom Hank's filmography, taken as a whole, makes a case for the banality of goodness. Because after Forrest Gump, this theme becomes a bit of a central preoccupation in Hanks’s movies—the World War II sergeant who does his duty faithfully in Saving Private Ryan— the prison warden who treats an accused sex-offender kindly, in The Green Mile—the politician who decides to give up his life of philandering and take up the cause of the oppressed in Charlie Wilson’s War. There’s also Ben Bradlee’s intractable commitment to reporting the truth in The Post, and James Donovan’s determination to give a Soviet a fair trail, despite the cost to his reputation, in Bridge of Spies. And don’t get me started on Mr. Rogers.

Among other things, what binds all these characters together are the simple decisions they face to do right instead of wrong; though often these decisions very quickly cease to be simple, they bring into being a goodness that often grows to monumental proportions, with world-changing stakes.

This is a Christian assessment of Tom Hanks’s movies, of course, so, having pointed out the “banality of goodness” that his work often illustrates, let me simply recall that Jesus himself taught something very similar—that the least would turn out, in the final analysis, to be the greatest, and the those who were faithful in the small things would be faithful in the big. Perhaps, among other things, our Lord had in mind the truth about the banality of goodness—that goodness thrived, actually, in the small, the mundane, the ordinary—when he said this.

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